Archive for the Us vs. the elites Category

As the country teeters into recession, many businesses, like individuals, are feeling the pinch. But not Accenture. As Barron’s reports, Accenture is poised to maintain double-digit growth:

The company, a leader in management consulting and technology outsourcing, profits handsomely by helping big corporations change continually to meet the demands of their markets.

Lately, the change that’s often required is downsizing — layoffs and other cost cutting. Grim as that may be for the companies and their workers, it’s hardly bad news for Accenture: It has been posting double-digit growth in revenues and earnings ever since the credit crunch began last year.

There’s only one fly in the ointment for the company: it can’t seem to get enough publicity for its “achievements” despite high-profile TV ads featuring Tiger Woods. This means its stock is undervalued.

To Barron’s, this represents an investment opportunity. “[T]he transformational quality of Accenture’s work,” the journal writes, “should go a long way toward transforming its stock price ever higher.”

They’re probably right. And if the average laid-off American worker only had a few million lying around, he could buy Accenture stock, and the profits would more than make up for the lost wages.

Let’s face it: we (meaning not just we the people, but also the Chattering Classes whom we listen to) don’t cut politicians much slack when it comes to misspeaking. One “unacceptable” remark, gesture, or even raising of one’s voice can bring to naught a hundred eloquent speeches. Howard Dean’s screams and George Allen’s “macaca” slur immediately come to mind. Both were blown vastly out of proportion to their true significance (if they had any), and ended up sinking two otherwise promising candidates’ campaigns.

Michelle Obama’s statement, uttered back in February, that she was only now, “for the first time in [her] adult lifetime, … really proud of [her] country” touched off a firestorm of indignation, but ultimately didn’t wreck her husband’s campaign—arguably because, after all, it wasn’t the candidate, but only his wife, who had made such a gaffe. And as her subsequent remarks showed, she didn’t really mean that she had never experienced pride in her country until her husband’s campaign picked up steam. She’d simply misspoken.

Should “Bittergate”—the controversy surrounding Senator Obama’s remarks at a private fundraising event in San Francisco—be viewed in the same light? Should we just accept the fact that words sometimes come out wrong even when you’re a presidential candidate, and move on?

I say no.

Why? Because Obama’s remarks, unfortunately, sound much more like something he meant than something he didn’t.
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In a highly perceptive editorial, two guest columnists at Newsday castigate the current presidential candidates’ empty posturing on middle class issues.

“Addressing economic insecurity among the middle class has been a recurring theme among the contenders and a top concern in the polls,” write Jennifer Wheary and Thomas Shapiro. “Candidates have played to this concern, but only superficially. Politics often turns into a game of appearances, so that it’s not about who has the solutions but who has the best sound bites.”

Indeed.
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In a refreshing departure from most elite institutions’ policies of catering to the wealthy, giving some token aid to the “disadvantaged,” and leaving the middle class out in the cold, Harvard has instituted a program specifically designed to help those with middle incomes.
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In an excellent editorial in the L.A. Times and Baltimore Sun, Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel describe in detail something that many Americans have felt for a long time: today's "liberalism" has betrayed its working-class roots.

Liberalism once embodied a genuine concern for working Americans that expressed itself in governmental programs designed to protect them, e.g. Social Security, unemployment compensation, OSHA, and so on. What passes for "liberalism" today is little more than the self-absorbed conceit of a wealthy intelligentsia—an intelligentsia that has a few pet concerns (the environment, gay rights, abortion rights), but nothing but disdain for average working Americans.
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